


The Prodigal

by Lady_Caryatid



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Enjolras - Freeform, Enjolras Was A Charming Young Man Who Was Capable Of Being Terrible, Enjolras-centric, Other, enjol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-20
Updated: 2014-09-20
Packaged: 2018-02-18 02:30:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2331950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Caryatid/pseuds/Lady_Caryatid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Enjolras' father contemplates the untimely death of his only son, as well as the icy relationship they shared for a short time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Prodigal

**Author's Note:**

> I love Enjolras' character, but while browsing the fandom I felt like a disproportionate amount of fics and fan works seem only to concentrate on ships like E/É or E/R, and I wanted to try something about him from a different perspective.

 

You have come here to ask me about my son. Why do you ask? What good will it do you? My son, Sébastien, is dead, you say, well yes, I know that. He has been dead to me a long time, ever since he utterly rejected the straight path his mother and I had spent carving for him, setting off to go to Paris and become a doomed radical leader. Nothing good could ever come out of that, I said as he left, but did he listen? Of course not! And so youth is cut short by a shameful death by firing squad. And such youth he had, and beauty too–so much like his mother, he was, bless her soul. If he had only stayed within the appropriate social circles we had set up for him, we might have been able to find him a suitable girl from among the daughters of my colleagues, a young woman of good standing with a sizable dowry. But he would hear nothing of marriage, courting, or contracts, nor would he participate in any of the parties or events I would arrange to get him to mix with proper folk.

Oh, my poor Thérese! If only you have lived, you may have made a better impression on him. He was as fair as you were in life–slender, with golden hair that kept its sheen even as he grew up. It's such a shame little Henriette was only decently handsome. Perhaps it was because of your absence that he turned out the way he did. With the lack of a mother he turned to other things to fill the vacancy–o the foolish passions of youth! Politics and democracies, the speech of lunatics and regicides, how did they ever come to fill his head?

 _You want another revolution?_ I shouted after him several times, as he turned cold and stormed away into his study, _You know nothing of such things! I was there, at the rear end of the last century, I was there to see the rosy words of Robespierre ripen into blood flowing through the streets of Paris, as the rule of the monarchs appointed by God was usurped by knaves and selfish, lesser men. Fear, chaos, anarchy! Everything of beauty despised and destroyed! The churches, violated! And yet, look what the Emperor has done for us, brought stability back to our homes. Do you wish to undo all that, so that more calamity may fall upon us? To ruin everything I have worked for, to provide you with the best of everything? Tell me, Sébastien, are you so blind to the needs of your country that you wish to inflict new wounds while we still feel the sting of the old ones?_

He then turned towards me, speaking calmly but with a willful spark in his pale eyes. _Would you accuse me of treason, Father?_ he said. _You know that I think upon nothing else but my beloved nation, and how it grieves me to see her so enslaved._

_Enslaved! Harnessed, equipped, guided, perhaps, by those wise enough to avoid a rule of fools! A horse drawing a carriage needs blinders to keep it from rearing!_

_So you would call men blind brutes? A man is no less human just because he happens to have been born a little closer to the earth than I have been, and it is his right to be treated as such._

_Pretty ideals from one who has hardly lived long enough to experience the world. What do you know of such things!_

_Enough to know where my convictions stand._

We spoke very little after that conversation. He was seventeen, stubborn to his last breath, a plague on all his tutors, and as for myself, I was weak. Yes, I know there are some who would rather deny their faults, but here I shall brazenly admit mine: I was weak, weak enough to allow my only son to wander away to the north and to his death. At that time I would not allow myself to care; we had a silent arrangement, Sébastien and I. I would fund his life away from home, and he would trouble me no more with tirades of "republicanism" and "popular opinion" and other such nonsense. I harbored a vague hope that the prodigal would return home, reformed with renewed humility, but that hope was little more than a comforting lie I recited to myself and to poor Henriette every week . And now he is gone because of my weakness. But he may as well have been dead even before the breath was struck out of him by eight fatal bullets. We exchanged no letters and there were no visits, for six years–or was it seven? I cannot even remember.

They identified his body after the carnage was over. That same day, I was in a small town not far from Paris on a business venture when a messenger told me the fatal news, and urged me to hastily go into the city.

I hurried over and met a group of officials at the mortuary, the ones helping with properly identifying and burying the dead.

One of them, a thin, pale man with a wispy mustache addressed me. "We're very grateful that you have come. Now, if you do not mind–"

"Yes, yes, I know already. Where is my son?"

"M'sieur..."

"Where have you laid him?"

The thin man reluctantly lead me over, past many tables covered with caskets and bodies covered with white shrouds. The stench was strong and pervasive, yet still I walked on. _So this is what your grand ideas have come to, Sébastien,_ I thought bitterly. _God take us all in the end._ It was not supposed to be this way. I should have been the one to be taken first, years later, as the grandfather of many beautiful descendants, who would not take their inheritance for granted, but do even more splendid things with it. I should not have been so weak that time, should not have given in to the prodigal's demands...

"Monsieur Enjolras," the wispy-mustachioed man woke me from my contemplations. "Here he is." He gestured to yet another shrouded body. I shuddered to think what was underneath, yet I steeled my resolve.

"Let me see him."

The man obediently nodded.

I remember once, as a young man, I traveled to Rome and spent many hours evading guards and wandering amongst the great statues and pillars. I wasn't sure what I had  been expecting or dreading as the man drew back the white coverlet, but the same delicacy of stillness present in those marble sculptures was present in this pale, motionless figure before me, whose features seemed not quite dead–rather, they seemed never to have been quite alive at all, having come straight from the chisel of Michelangelo himself. It was Sébastien, but more akin to the Apollonian Saint Sebastian, who had pierced as well, not with bullets, but with many arrows.

"We were wondering, M'sieur, if you wanted to have him buried at your estate...what with his background and all."

I stared at this harrowing, ethereal vision a moment longer. His face seemed vague and alien, like all faces in death, so unlike the Sébastien I had known. But had I ever really known him? I thought back on the years we had spent together in our large house in the South of France; even as a child, I never could fathom the dreams and calculations that flickered behind those steely eyes while they were still open.

"Bury him in Paris." I murmured.

I took one last look at the marble apparition before drawing the shroud back over it.

"But–M'sieur, he's your son, right? Shouldn't he be interred with the rest of your family?"

I didn't answer him at first, but glanced around the house of death, at the multitudes lying similarly on tables who had followed the beautiful apparition before me. They had fought together, sung together, even as the blood of their comrades stained their clothes and as they choked on the scent of gunpowder and rotting flesh. And somehow, somehow they had managed to cling to that vision of a world, that castle on a cloud built on a fragile foundation of words, gilded ideals, the things that Sébastien had called convictions....

"This..."

I counted out a number of sovereigns, enough to cover the cost of the rites for all the foolhardy fallen in that room.

"This was his family."

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Enjolras is kind of a paradox, described in the Brick as "An only son, and wealthy," from Southern France (pronounces Napoleon's last name "Buonoparte"), while at the same time a passionate social activist. Judging by his admiration of Rousseau, ("That man abandoned his children but adopted the people!" he says once), he seemed like someone who would be willing to cut ties with family to pursue a greater purpose. We don't get to hear much about his family, but I thought it would be interesting to speculate on his roots. Thank you for reading, and Vive la France!


End file.
